Thread by @Tracking_Power

Are Jews discriminated against in British society?

To answer this, we must understand what is meant by ‘discrimination’, which is different to a ‘hate crime’.

Below you can see official UK definitions for both terms.



https://t.co/tbcrT4KUoW https://t.co/R47B2ca07jgov.uk/discrimination…
met.police.uk/advice/advice-…

There’s lots of data on the status of Jews in society (with distinctions within and between groups).

Let’s start with Norman Finkelstein:

‘British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful.’

https://t.co/QasLIl6iaMversobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/ne…

Next, is Finkelstein’s colleague/comrade Jamie Stern-Weiner. Here he is writing for Jewish Voice for Labour in 2019:

‘antisemitic attitudes ... in British society do not appear to translate into socioeconomic discrimination.’

https://t.co/opPifrihdQjewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/smoke-…

Finkelstein and Stern-Weiner are both Jewish, although their analysis would be correct even if they weren’t.

It’s no more ‘antisemitic’ for Jewish people to report facts about prejudice and privilege than it is for me or anyone else.

Racism isn’t about subjective feelings or one’s ‘standpoint’ conferred by social location. It’s about the material reality of violence and discrimination which is susceptible to empirical verification or falsification.

Here’s some data on the alleged anti-Jewish epidemic:

But the best evidence is in social science studies. A 2010 report from the National Equality Panel provided data on hourly wages broken down by gender and religion:

https://t.co/9hld2EKkVxeprints.lse.ac.uk/28344/1/CASEre…

A 2012 study for the Policy Commission on the Distribution of Wealth provided a ranking of ‘median net wealth’ of households:

https://t.co/dkA0ZoUksqbirmingham.ac.uk/documents/rese…

One of the most comprehensive studies was carried out in 2008 for the EHRC, the UK ‘equalities’ watchdog. It found that:

‘[T]he pay advantage of Jewish men can be observed at all levels of the pay distribution’.

https://t.co/10CMkdzSuwequalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/…

The data is very clear on pay gaps between Jewish and Muslim men, and on predicted pay, as these tables show:

In case you are thinking that the reasons Jewish people do so well (as a whole) is because they are so ‘clever’, ‘bright’ or ‘intelligent’, or – in a slightly less racist formulation – more ‘educated’, the EHRC data appears not to support that view.

Do Jews face institutional racism from the state, the police, the counter-terrorism apparatus? Are they racially profiled? Are they regularly (or ever) stopped under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act?

To ask the question is to answer it. Jews face no such threats. Muslims do.

Are Jewish people returning to Britain from occupied Palestine – after being radicalised into joining the Israel Occupation Forces and terrorising Palestinians – routinely detained by counter-terrorism forces? No.

Should they be? Absolutely.

Jews as a whole – on every metric examined above – are not discriminated against. Jews are the most privileged minority group. They’re over-represented in all areas of British public life. With that privilege comes the power to make economic, political and cultural decisions.

On Palestine, this translates into power to colonise through donations from British Jews to Zionist organisations that are stealing Palestinian land.